people care!”
He drew in breath to make a dozen replies, then saw her smile, and understood what she meant.
“If you can change thought, you can change the world,” she said softly.
He pushed his hands farther into his pockets, his fists clenched tight. “And what thought was it you intended to change with this picture, Miss Antrim?”
She seemed faintly amused. He saw the flicker in her eyes.
“The thought that women are content with a passive role in love,” she replied. “We are imprisoned in other people’s ideas of who we are and what we feel, what makes us happy. . or what hurts. We allow it to happen. To be chained by your own beliefs is bad enough, heaven knows; but to be chained by other people’s is monstrous.” Her face was alight as she spoke. There was a kind of luminous beauty in her, as if she could see far beyond the physically jarring image on the paper to the spiritual freedom she was seeking, not for herself so much as for others. If it was a lonely crusade, she was prepared for it and her courage was more than equal to it.
“Don’t you understand?” she said urgently to his silence. “Nobody has the right to decide what other people want or feel! And we do it all the time, because it’s what we need them to want.” She was close to him. He could feel the warmth of her, see the faint down on her cheek. “We feel more comfortable, it feeds our preconceptions, our ideas about who we are,” she went on fiercely. “Or else it is what we can give them, so we decide it is what they want. They should be grateful. It is for their good. It is for somebody’s good. It is what is right or natural. . or most of all, it is what God wants! What monumental arrogance that we should decide that what is comfortable for us is what Almighty God wants. And we should make it so.”
“All of the pictures?” Pitt asked with the very faintest sarcastic edge to his voice, but he had to struggle to find it. “Some of them seemed blasphemous to me.”
“To you?” Her marvelous eyes widened. “My dear, pedestrian Superintendent. Blasphemous to you! What is blasphemy?”
He jammed his hands farther still into his pockets, straightening his arms. He could not allow her to intimidate him because she was beautiful and articulate and supremely sure of herself.
“I think it is jeering at other people’s beliefs,” he replied quietly. “Making them doubt the possibility of good and making reverence appear ridiculous. Whose God it is doesn’t matter. It isn’t a question of doctrine, it’s a matter of trying to destroy the innate idea we have of deity, of something better and holier than we are.”
“Oh. . Superintendent.” She let her breath out in a sigh. “I think I have just been bested by a policeman! Please don’t tell anyone. . I shall never live it down. I apologize. Yes, that is what blasphemy is. . and I did not mean to commit it. I meant to make people question stereotypes and look again at us as individuals, every one different, never again say ‘She’s a woman, so she feels this. . or that. . and if she doesn’t, then she ought to. Or ‘He’s a priest, he must be good, what he says must be right, he doesn’t have this weakness, or that passion. . if he does he’s wicked.” Her eyes widened. “Do you understand me?”
“Yes, I understand you, Miss Antrim.”
“But you disagree with me. I can see it in your face. You think I shock people, and it is painful. I am breaking something, and you hate breakage. You are here to keep order, to protect the weak, to prevent violent change, or any change that is not by consent of the masses.” She spread her hands wide-strong, beautiful hands. “But art must lead, Superintendent, not follow. It is my work to upset convention, to defy assumptions, to suggest that disorder out of which progress is born. If you were to succeed. . entirely. . we would not even have fire, let alone a wheel!”
“I am all for fire, Miss Antrim, but not for burning people. Fire can destroy as well as create.”
“So can everything that has real power,” she responded. “Have you seen
“I beg your pardon?”
“Ibsen! The play-
He had not seen it, but he knew what she was talking about. The playwright had dared to create a heroine who had rebelled against everything that was expected of her, most of all by herself, and in the end left her husband and home for a dangerous and lonely freedom. It had created a furor. It was condemned passionately by some as subversive and destructive of morality and civilization. Others praised it as honest and the beginning of a new liberation. A few simply said it was brilliant and perceptive art, most particularly since it was written with such sensitivity and insight of a woman’s nature-by a man. Pitt had heard Joshua praise it with almost the same burning enthusiasm as Cecily Antrim now showed.
“Well?” she demanded, the light in her face fading with exasperation as she began to believe she was confusing him.
“There are some differences,” he said tentatively. “One chooses to go to the theatre. These pictures are on sale to the public. What if young people are there. . boys who know no better. .”
She waved it aside. “There are always risks, Superintendent. There can be no gain without a certain cost. To be born at all is to risk being alive. Dare it! Shame the devil of the real death. . the death of the will, of the spirit! Oh. . and don’t bother to ask me who saw that picture. I would tell you if I could. . I am deeply sorry Delbert Cathcart is dead-he was a great artist-but I can’t tell you because I haven’t the slightest idea!” And with that she turned and walked out of the door, leaving it wide open behind her, and he heard her footsteps dying away along the passage.
He stood alone in the dressing room and looked around at the trappings of illusion, the paint and the costumes which help the imagination. They were wrought with skill, but they were a minuscule part of the real magic. That sprang from the soul and the will, the inner world created with such passion it poured through and no material aids were needed to make it leap from one mind to another. Words, movement, gesture, the fire of the spirit made it real.
He looked at the photograph again. How many people were chained by other people’s beliefs of them? Did he expect Charlotte to be something that was not her true nature or what she really wished? Then he thought back to his first meeting with Caroline. In some ways she had been imprisoned. . but by family, society, her husband-or herself? The prisoner who loves his bonds is surely also responsible for their continuance?
He would rather Jemima, with her sharp, inquisitive mind, did not ever see a picture like this. . certainly not until she was at least Charlotte’s present age.
What kind of a man would she marry? That was a preposterous thought! She was a child. He could see her bright little face in his mind’s eye so easily, so vividly, her child’s slender body, but already growing taller, legs longer. One day she would marry someone. Would he be gentle with her, allow her some freedom, and still protect her? Would he be strong enough to wish her happiness in whatever path it lay? Or would he try to make her conform to his own view of what was right? Would he ever see her as herself, or only as what he needed her to be?
So much of him agreed with what Cecily Antrim was trying to do, and yet the picture offended him-not only because he had seen it mimicked in death but because of the innate violence in it.
Was that necessary in order to shatter complacency? He did not know.
But he would have to send Tellman to establish beyond doubt where Cecily Antrim had been on the night of Cathcart’s death, even though he did not believe she had killed him. There had been no fear in her, no shock, no sense of personal involvement at all.
He would also send Tellman to find out precisely where Lord Warriner had been that night, just in case his love for her was less casual than it appeared. But that was a formality, simply something not to be overlooked. She had posed willingly for the picture; in fact, from what she had said, it had been her idea. She wanted them sold. The last thing she intended was for such a performance to be without an audience.
He pushed the picture back into his pocket and went to the door. He found his way out past piled screens and painted trees and walls, and several pieces of beautifully carved wood, to the stage door.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Caroline returned home with new heart and went straight upstairs before she could think better of it. She knocked on the old lady’s door, and when there was no answer, she opened it and went in.
